MS should spend some money doing some quick media for the not-so-clueful to explain why...
Software companies used to provide tons of printed manuals with their products that people didn't read. Now they provide electronic manuals and websites that people don't read. Anyone who has ever worked in an IT role knows that you average two brain cell, mid level manager couldn't care less about 'what you tech guys do over in your office' so long as they still get their long lunch and company car. As for the home user... forget it. After you spend an hour explaining to granny what an attachment is odds are she will just open it anyway. The problem is that people are inherently disinterested in anything outside their confort zone. Even if you explained it too them 15 times they will still open the attachment. You just need to look at how much money heath organisations have put into anti smoking campaigns with limited success, people don't listen. Don't waste your breath and deffinately don't waste another rain forest printing instructions.
Sorry, that is the Australian ISP costing model anyway. As was so rightly pointed out, the problem with my suggested approach is that it has the potential for someone to turn it against a legitimate business or person by spoofing their details. Not to say that you still couldn't be a little smarter about it, a business using SPAM marketing has to provide some point of contact so that the responses they do want can get back, not necessarily just an email address. At the very least an automated system could gather and colate these details. Once again, even this wouldn't be foolproof as a completely bogus email would simply create more traffic as the automated system tried to determine it's legitimacy or perform it's action on an invalid target, it's a start.
Good Point.
Much better to lead them down the garden path with false details and simply waste their time to make the exercise no longer profitable. I like the idea of passing them back the details of another spammer.
There are some new laws about to be passed in Australia to make it illegal for a company to profit from SPAM. I realise that many of these people operate from other countries without such laws, but it's a good start.
In addition to this there is the costing model used by most ISP's, where the user will pay for items that they download but not for what they upload. In the current situation the 'economy of SPAM' is based upon having a massive number of emails and a very small number (percentage wise) of responses. The current ISP costing model advantages the spammers. If your anti SPAM software actualy sent a 'no-thanks' type response of the origionator, they would by paying to download each of these messages. Even by counter blocking at the other end they still need to download the message first before they can determine it's legitimacy. If you can break the economy of SPAM your put the spammer out of business. Even the richest spammer still has to rely on a tiny percentage return to generate their income.
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MS should spend some money doing some quick media for the not-so-clueful to explain why...
Software companies used to provide tons of printed manuals with their products that people didn't read. Now they provide electronic manuals and websites that people don't read. Anyone who has ever worked in an IT role knows that you average two brain cell, mid level manager couldn't care less about 'what you tech guys do over in your office' so long as they still get their long lunch and company car. As for the home user... forget it. After you spend an hour explaining to granny what an attachment is odds are she will just open it anyway.
The problem is that people are inherently disinterested in anything outside their confort zone. Even if you explained it too them 15 times they will still open the attachment. You just need to look at how much money heath organisations have put into anti smoking campaigns with limited success, people don't listen. Don't waste your breath and deffinately don't waste another rain forest printing instructions.
Join the rest of us for a beer instead.
Sorry, that is the Australian ISP costing model anyway. As was so rightly pointed out, the problem with my suggested approach is that it has the potential for someone to turn it against a legitimate business or person by spoofing their details. Not to say that you still couldn't be a little smarter about it, a business using SPAM marketing has to provide some point of contact so that the responses they do want can get back, not necessarily just an email address. At the very least an automated system could gather and colate these details. Once again, even this wouldn't be foolproof as a completely bogus email would simply create more traffic as the automated system tried to determine it's legitimacy or perform it's action on an invalid target, it's a start.
Good Point. Much better to lead them down the garden path with false details and simply waste their time to make the exercise no longer profitable. I like the idea of passing them back the details of another spammer. There are some new laws about to be passed in Australia to make it illegal for a company to profit from SPAM. I realise that many of these people operate from other countries without such laws, but it's a good start.
In addition to this there is the costing model used by most ISP's, where the user will pay for items that they download but not for what they upload. In the current situation the 'economy of SPAM' is based upon having a massive number of emails and a very small number (percentage wise) of responses. The current ISP costing model advantages the spammers. If your anti SPAM software actualy sent a 'no-thanks' type response of the origionator, they would by paying to download each of these messages. Even by counter blocking at the other end they still need to download the message first before they can determine it's legitimacy. If you can break the economy of SPAM your put the spammer out of business. Even the richest spammer still has to rely on a tiny percentage return to generate their income.